Long, long ago, when my father was deeply into Christian spirituality, serving for years as a Methodist minister, he asked his bishop if it would be okay to smoke while he prayed.
The Bishop was firm. Of course not. Prayer should be thought of as a deeply religious expression of faith, a conversation with God. Smoking would be out of place.
My father was considered a bit of a gadfly in the early 1950s. As pastor to a rural conservative church, he preached a sermon against McCarthyism. The Bishop resisted the tsunami of outraged demands that this troublesome preacher be rid of.
A couple of years later, after the outcry diminished, my dad was quietly transferred to a small town. It was there that he objected to a cherished annual event, a minstrel show in blackface.
The outcry became deafening when he preached about it in a sermon entitled:
Know the truth, and the truth shall make you sick.
I think the title was taken from something written by noted liberal crusader Norman Cousins, which wouldn’t have gone over well.
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